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"Ordinarily, when you think of the phrase ‘free software’, the definition that comes to mind is a piece of tool that can be used or modified freely without any restriction.
Matt Asay set the cat amongst the pigeons late last week with his post declaring that “Free software has lost. Open source has won." To my mind, there is actually a lot to agree with in Matt’s post but where it falls down is in its generalisation of the Free Software movement.
"Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution.
This is huge! Microsoft and Red Hat have signed a *patent-free* virtualization interoperability pact. Here's Red Hat's press release and some analysis by Matt Asay here. Congratulations to Red Hat for refusing to buckle on this vital matter, and to Red Hat Legal for working out the details, and a tip of the hat to Microsoft, for facing reality and doing the right thing.
Open source is changing not just how companies make software, but how they sell it. Alfresco's Matt Asay explains the new sales cycle and the skills that today's software sales people need to close deals.
I'm a big fan of Matt Asay's writings about free software even though I have been rather dreading the appearance of one that I knew, one day, he would write...because it would be wrong. And now he has written it, with the self-explanatory headline: “Free software is dead. Long live open source.”
“Open Source” advocate: «...I associate much more with the "Open Source" (also as Richard defines it) camp, and am open to the existence and use of proprietary software...» --
“What's in a name?” some bloke in the sixteenth century once asked. As Microsoft knows, quite a lot. What you call something can have a major influence on how you think about it. So how Microsoft talks about free software is important – not least for the clues that it gives about its latest tactical move to defang the open source threat.